Beavis: Hey, Butthead. What is a black hole? Butthead: So like, a black hole is like, this giant bunghole in outer space. It's like, it sucks up the whole universe, and then it's like, it grinds it up and sends it all to Hell or something.

Black holes. They're the most terrifying things in the known universe. They're huge masses of... well, nothing (but they do have a lot of mass); and nothing, not even light, can travel fast enough to escape them. Unfortunate items which do fall in are spaghettified (the official scientific term), stretched thin by tidal forces, the black hole ripping atom from atom, then ripping up the atoms. But that's only if you get too close. From far away enough, in a stable orbit, being near a black hole would just be the same as orbiting a massive, invisiblenote The gravitational lensing effect is hard to overlook so the black hole would appear as a silhouette against the stars - see the Other Wiki for a simulation thereof. star, only the black hole would be much bigger.note Often as far across in diameter as Neptune's orbit.

... Unless it's fiction. Sometimes they just suck in everything around them like giant space-vacuum-cleaners, seeing as Gravity Sucks. Also commonly, a black hole will be represented as an actual hole in space and it will be perfectly possible to enter a black hole and leave it safely. Relativistic time dilation tends to be ignored; a character voyaging into a black hole can leave it without time warping, while those outside can see things enter a black hole without slowing to a crawl. Hovering black holes are often seen as weapons. Also, if a black hole forms during the story, expect its gravitational pull to instantly skyrocket instead of remaining the same as the pull of the star that collapsed to form it.

Examples

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Anime and Manga

In DieBustera giant space monster managed to absorb the black hole he was trapped in and turn it into a weapon. When the heroes destroyed him, they accidentally split the black hole in half, almost causing a new Big Bang. They managed to save the day, in a way that even one of characters admitted is beyond human's understanding.

Hilariously enough, the original series, GunBuster, was actually a lot better with this than most modern depictions: when the aforementioned black hole is spontaneously created in the midst of an enemy fleet, the animation depicting it is fairly accurate: the accretion disc is the only visible part of the thing, which otherwise looks like a giant spherical void, complete with particle discharges from the poles. And the gravitational effects of having a black hole only a few hundred AU's from Earth are touched upon. There's still the idea that an overloaded spaceship engine could create a black hole in the first place, but this series also has Inazuma Kicks, so...

Gildarts from Fairy Tail actually crushed a black hole that Bluenote brought into existence. Justified in that Gildarts, Bluenote, and all major characters are magic users.

Katekyō Hitman Reborn! has Kozato Enma, who can create stars and black holes at will as part of his Earth Flames. Tsuna can still fly past the black holes and blow it up. In addition, the black holes never affect anyone not involved in the fight; observers can stay in the same room as one and not be spaghettified; if the series used realistic black holes the whole planet Earth would be as dead as it's possible to get the instant one showed up.

InuYasha has Miroku who has a uni-directional black hole (in his palm!) which he can control by using magic beads and a strip of cloth. It's capable of absorbing any size of enemy (or object) yet won't absorb Miroku yet.

The Sailor Moon Super S movie had the titular black dream hole. Which was spherical. And the inside was apparently made of webbing.

Comic Books

In a 70s Green Lantern story, Oa was threatened by a black hole, apparently moving rather quickly, drawn like a two-dimensional object, and collapsed by an ancient alien, ending the threat.

In a modern DC comic, an alien drops a very small virtual (gravity but not mass) black hole before leaving the Earth. That would mean the end of the whole planet, if not for Superman grabbing it and keeping it contained in his fist until the virtual gravity ceases and the black hole dissolves. If it doesn't make any sense to you, you are welcome.

In an old Firestorm comic, a giant named Brimstone is trapped in the center of the sun, and his presence creates a black hole. Firestorm, at this point Dr. Martin Stein a lone fire elemental, closes the black hole by shoving Brimstone through it, but gets sucked up himself. He winds emerging from a White Hole in a parallel universe, and resolves to spend his time exploring the place. Comics, everybody!

The premise of Rogue Trooper depends on this - Nu Earth is situated next to a black hole through which both the Norts and Southers want to be able to send their ships.

In Final Crisis, Darkseid's fall to Earth causes it to drift toward a black hole. The Green Lantern Corps have to push their power to the limit to reach Earth in time, but manage to pull Earth away just in time. Also Darkseid apparently has a black hole where his heart should be. His very existence is actually dragging the entire Multiverse into the black hole. Fortunately for plausibility, the black hole in Darkseid's chest is justified due to him being a god and therefore above such pesky things as physics.

Towards the end of Shakara, the title character rigs the Museum of War to trap the Big Bad's soldiers that pursue him. The weapons he use are black hole bombs, each of which creates a black hole about the size of a basketball when it detonates, and immediately sucks up his pursuers.

There's a comic in Marvel Star Wars which involves the Millennium Falcon, piloted by Luke, playing chicken with a Star Destroyer and a black hole and managing, through the Force, to take subtle maneuvers at the very edge of their personal event horizon. The Star Destroyer tries to follow the maneuver and doesn't manage.

Xorn was very bad about this. Supposedly his head was a black hole, and the only thing keeping it in place was a strange metal helmet. The prospect of taking off his helmet was considered incredibly dangerous, never mind the fact that it would only be dangerous to anything very close to his head. It's even worse in the Ultimate universe where he (or Zorn, it's hard to keep them apart) simply explodes into a disproportionately large black hole that magically begins to suck up everything within a few dozen miles. It gets even worse when his brother supposedly turns into the opposite of a black hole: a star* A black hole is the fate of any large star. The true opposite of a black hole would be a white hole, which would, theoretically, push away all mass..

In the case of Ultimate Marvel, Xorn represents illumination which is the opposite of a black hole's devouring of light. It represents their conflicting philosophies and not stars and black holes themselves. The visual representation of Zorn's black hole can also be attributed to the artist.

The writer who originally defined Xorn's powers did so in the context that they were entirely made up by Magneto, who was subsequently disappointed that the X-Men hadn't realised it was total nonsense.

Chester P. Runk aka Chunk, a 1990s The FlashAnti-Villain was a "Human Black Hole". He apparently had total control of whether he absorbed things, as long as he kept absorbing something. Everything he absorbed, including people who annoyed him, was sent, unharmed, to another dimension. If he didn't absorb enough material, he would "implode" ... and also end up, unharmed in the other dimension.

During Walt Simonson's run on Fantastic Four, the FF, along with The Mighty Thor and Iron Man, time-travelled to the mid 21st century where the Black Celestial had built a weapon to destroy all reality so he could recreate the universe in his image. It turns out that his weapon was Galactus; he had somehow amplified his hunger for planets to the point where Galactus converted himself into a giant black hole which would, in time, suck up all matter in the universe, from all points of time, leading to a Class X-4 Apocalypse How, possibly bordering on Class Z. As this alternate future was encased in a time bubble, Galactus was able to eliminate this time line from happening by deploying the Ultimate Nullifier.

Fan Works

Actually averted in the Star Trek Online fanfic "A Changed World", which uses the gravitational redshifting and Time Dilation surrounding a black hole as plot points: a Bajoran starship and a Klingon battlecruiser are dragged 139 years into the future due to proximity to one, and the Distress Signal is distorted so badly by the black hole that it took that long for it to be detected by any passing ships. The stated mass and physical size of the black hole are also realistic.

Films — Animated

Disney's Treasure Planet deals momentarily with a super nova going black hole. It's part of how they kill off Mr. Arrow (sadly, not to return). The RLS Legacy drifts partially into the emerging black hole, gets hit by the 'biggest magilla of them all', and rides the solar energy out of the black hole safely. And then there's an awesome shot of the accretion disk in the following scene. Which is... blue?

Films — Live-Action

The film Godzilla vs. Megaguirus features the Dimension Tide, an orbital satellite that fires a small black hole at the earth in order to send Godzilla into another dimension. It doesn't work. Also somehow the three black holes they create just kinda disappear from existence without much fuss or well swallowing the entire planet. They also manage to create a wormhole that opens just in time to bring back an ancient bug for Godzilla to fight and then close up without any further mention.

The 2009 Star Trek. Not only do characters travel through a black hole to another universe and another time, they escape its pull after they cross the event horizon (though they do have faster-than-light technology). It's really inconsistent, and makes you wonder why they researched all the science if they were going to ignore details at random. It's not as if Star Trek doesn't have plenty of swirly spacetime anomalies to pick and choose from anyway, so going with the relatively well-understood phenomenon of a black hole and systematically getting every detail about them wrong at various points was a little jarring. The black holes are also 2D, or very flat, and each surrounded by scary lightning, regardless of whether it's turning into a wormhole in that scene. Worse still, the planet Vulcan is consumed by a black hole… in minutes, not the near hour it would take at a minimum; completely, rather than forming an accretion disc; and without flooding the vicinity with enough X rays to vaporize every starship around, shields or no shields. It was made with Red Matter (and very small amounts of it too, for that matter), made by Vulcans for the purpose of creating a black hole to counteract a supernova. Forget about Accretion Disks, Event Horizons and General Relativity... things work differently when you have an intelligent alien race manufacturing black holes for their own purposes (then again, Romulans have been doing exactly that for decades, using tiny black holes to power their ships).

Disney's The Black Hole is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, including a notable accretion disk that gives it the appearance of a swirly purplish hurricane. At the end the heroes fall through the hole and emerge, evidently, in another universe. Meanwhile, the bad guys end up in hell. Good ol' NightmareFuel for the kiddies. It's actually implied that they all died. The heroes ended up in Heaven, the baddies in Hell. And apparently the robots were sentient enough to have a soul. Granted that the robots in charge of the technical duties were not robots…

The Giant Spider Invasion has the eponymous beasties arrive through a black hole that landed in a farmer's field. Without anything being sucked into it, natch. At the climax of the movie the black hole is saturated with neutrons and apparently neutralized, which causes all the spiders to burst into flames and ooze ice cream. Yes, it's a very bad movie.

Event Horizon. The titular spacecraft featured both "normal-space" engines and the "Hell-Drive". The former was a (horrendously misnamed) "Ion Drive". The latter used an ''artificial black hole" to do a gravity-based spacewarp that apparently takes you straight through the Warp. Touching the black hole, rather than tearing you to atoms, gets your hand stuck in "black hole goo", then pulls you bodily in before (somehow) spitting you back out.

The 2006 Sci Fi Channel film The Black Hole has one randomly open up in the middle of St. Louis; the protagonists have been messing around with physics is the only explanation. Also, its mass and stability are somehow directly linked to a transparent creature made of pure energy that came out of it when it appeared, and the only way to get rid of it is to drive the creature back into the hole. We don't get it either.

The Dark Elves in Thor: The Dark World use small grenades that generate black holes, though the effect is very localized: Malekith tosses one at Odin's throne and the grenade destroys just the throne, not a spherical area centered on it.

Interstellar averts most of the common pitfalls of relativity, Gravity Sucks, and so forth, and is to date one of the most accurate portrayals of a black hole in film, with even the graphical effects being based on equations written down by physicist (and executive producer) Kip Thorne. Everything that happens inside the black hole, however, is completely made-up, because scientists still have almost no idea what goes on inside.

Zathura is a justified example. The titular Zathura is a black hole used as a reset button, and sucks up everything created by the game as the players kept on. It's justified because it's not a real black hole, but a creation of the magical board game.

In the New Jedi Order series, the Yuuzhan Vong ships actually created tiny black holes as shields (they exist just long enough to absorb incoming ordnance, then collapse). Even assuming you could do that, when you collapsed the singularity the destroyed ordnance would burst out as pure energy (which would be an enormously bigger explosion than whatever the weapon could have caused normally). The same creature/components that do this also propel the ships.

The Maw is a massive cluster of black holes. Theories abound that it was constructed, like a number of other unlikely celestial objects in the galaxy, to have been built by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. The Fate of the Jedi series reveals that the Maw was made by the Killik using Centerpoint Station, that its purpose was as a prison for an Eldritch Abomination, and that destroying Centerpoint station opened a gap in the prison.

In "Masque of the Red Shift" Johann Karlsen takes a lifeboat into a black hole to lure a berserker ship to its doom.

In "The Temple of Mars" it turns out Karlsen went into orbit around the black hole within the event horizon, and in "The Face of the Deep" he's rescued from the black hole.

Joe Haldeman's novel The Forever War. Starships are able to travel hundreds of light years at a time by diving into collapsars (black holes). This is justified because Haldeman just made up the word "collapsars" to fit his book and then it suddenly became a real word to describe a type of black hole. Haldeman also has his characters suffer from time dilation due to traveling at relativistic speeds - the problems caused by this are part of why it's The Forever War.

Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth series generally treats black holes seriously, but there's a rather odd bit of pseudoscience in The End of the Matter, where a galaxy-sized "collapsar" (term likely borrowed from Haldeman) is neutralized by juxtaposing it with a similarly massive "expandar", or white hole, composed entirely of antimatter. Their respective gravitational fields suck material out of each other and mutually annihilate it. How this works is anyone's guess.

The long-out-of-print novel Earth Ship and Star Song posits an FTL drive which involves creating a black hole around your ship to fling you into hyperspace (or whatever), then creating another black hole while you're inside the first one. The second black hole supposedly "eats" the first one and pops you back out into normal space. Um... yeah.

One of the Red Dwarf novels had an arc in which the crew encountered a black hole. Whether it's handled realistically or not is... really up to you: Its effect on time is addressed by the narrator (as well as causing numerous problems for ship computer Holly, what with his components being in different weeks), and the Talkie Toaster (really) describes the process of spaghettification. However, they then proceed to use the event horizon to slingshot out of the black hole. And find out quite quickly from Lister, who was left on a nearby planet, that the entire maneuver took decades. Being spaghettified isn't really presented correctly though; the point is the gravity stretches and compresses everything into one long thin "noodle", but in the book it's more like becoming multiple strands of spaghetti. And the crew remain conscious the whole time and are conveniently "de-spaghettified" once they've completed the slingshot, rather than being extremely dead.

In The Magicians, Josh can produce what he identifies as a black hole. Cartoonily, his target gazes stupidly at the hole for a second before getting sucked in. In the book's world, no wizard really understands how magic works...

Averted in The Planck Dive, by Greg Egan, which describes what it would be like to fall into a black hole (assuming you could survive).

The Ellimist Chronicles - Originally a winged alien who became the Last of His Kind, the Ellimist accidentally falls into a black hole and becomes one with the fabric of space and time, effectively becoming a god capable of bending the laws of reality such as changing the rotation of a prehistoric Earth to preserve future humanity from his alien enemy, Crayak. Then Crayak duplicates this feat and also becomes a god, battling the Ellimist for all eternity. In that case, that means ANYONE who ever falls into a black hole would become as powerful as the Ellimist and Crayak. In real life, while a person could break down and become one with the singularity (center) of a black hole, they would first be ripped apart by the gravitational forces of the event horizon. Getting pulled apart and broken down to the point that even your atoms will be split apart would mean you would have no sentience to merge your consciousness with space and time as the Ellimist and Crayak did, due to a phenomenon currently known to science as dyinghorribly. (It's implied that this was due to Ellimist at this point being composed of a cloud of small spaceships, some of which didn't enter the event horizon, meaning he was able to experience being pulled into a black hole from the perspective of both subject and observer, resulting in something of a Reality-Breaking Paradox.)

Interestingly, in The Andalite Chronicles also has the protagonist get sucked into a black hole, though he manages to escape using the Time Matrix.

In the Star TrekExpanded Universe novel Star Trek: Federation, both Kirk's and Picard's Enterprises enter something called a "subspace" black hole, which consists of three singularities orbiting each other at warp speed. Apparently, anything that enters it from any time period appears to exist there simultaneously, allowing the ships to meet (Kirk orders the all sensors to turn to their lowest resolution in order to avoid gleaning any hints of future technology, as per the Temporal Prime Directive). Kirk's Enterprise passes Zefram Cochrane's shuttle to Picard's ship, and both ships exit at their respective "time zones". Lampshaded in that Spock tells Kirk "I cannot pretend to understand how such a thing could possibly exist."

In the novelization of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial by William Kotzwinkle, the eponymous alien is concerned that the higher gravity of Earth will cause his body to collapse into a black hole, which will then, in turn, swallow the earth and nearby planets. E.T. can safely be assured this is impossible. Justified in that, although E.T.'s species is probably advanced enough to know better, E.T. himself is a botanist. In any event, he is delirious and disoriented at the time.

Patrick Moore's Scott Saunders Space Adventure novels are generally on the harder side of the sci-fi scale. However, in the novel Secret of the Black Hole the eponymous artificial black hole was at one point described as being "at most an inch" in diameter. A black hole of such size would have greater mass than Earth, yet the hole was still orbiting the Earth, rather than vice versa. The novel was written in the 1970s, when black holes were even less well understood than now.

Timothy Zahn's Spinneret novel has an alien stardrive which is instantaneous, but made a lot less useful than one would think by the fact that it can only link together places in space where the gravitational fields from two nearby black holes cross. The ship flies right between the black holes and is somehow catapulted to its destination.

Christopher Stasheff's novel The Haunted Wizard has Matthew Mantrell order Maxwell's demon to create a quantum black hole (despite it having been proven impossible) and "drag it around the battlefield."

Mentioned by a villain in The Golden Oecumene, that due to the physics of the inside of a black hole, there is actually infinite space and computing power. It's never discovered if it's true or if it's blowing smoke.

In Angel Station, all FTL-capable ships are built around captured black holes. Yes, there are actual ships that go out to look for small enough singularities and capture them using special clamps without somehow being torn apart by the tidal forces. Those black holes then allow ships to make jumps to other stars, while releasing deadly amounts of radiation in their wake (causing the government to impose a mandatory No Warping Zone around any inhabited planet or station).

Justified in the Aeon 14 novel Destiny Lost. When the AST destroys the giant graviton generators that are keeping the brown dwarf-massed gas giant Aurora from collapsing and igniting, the brown dwarf collapses, causing a massive fusion explosion that compresses the core below the black hole diameter for its mass. The miniature nova also provides energy to keep open the portals to the dark layer through which the graviton generators pulled gravitons, which means the black hole begins absorbing dark matter as well as its immediate surroundings. Thus, it ends up with a larger mass and therefore larger gravitational pull than the object it formed from (the shift in the system's gravity pattern is mentioned to be causing earthquakes on inhabited planets in the system).

Live-Action TV

Star Trek: Voyager has the eponymous vessel, in its second episode enter a hole's event horizon, get trapped there, and then use a Dekiyon beam to widen a hole in said horizon in order to escape. For those who don't know, the event horizon is not a physical barrier, it's just a mathematical distance from the center of the black hole, and thus rather impossible to rip a hole in. However this was stated to be a quantum singularity, of which the rules may be different. Watch the episode for more information.

Stargate SG-1: The show both uses and partially averts this trope on a couple of occasions.

In "A Matter of Time," the Stargate connects to a planet falling into a black hole; the fact that time slows down near a black hole is used both as a plot point and for dramatic effect. The heroes must watch an unfortunate SG team on the doomed planet try to reach the gate – they keep running, but can never reach safety, as time slows to a crawl for them, and the 38 minutes the gate can stay open passes in only a few seconds from Stargate Command's perspective, barely long enough to get their badly redshifted authentication signal through. Carter also briefly nods toward real-life physics in that the time dilation effect is affecting a wider area than the black hole's gravity is, which is completely nonsensical (the time dilation and increased gravity are the same thing, you can't have one without the other), and she basically shrugs and admits "I have no idea how that's happening".

In "The New Order," the evil Replicators use a black hole's distortion of time and some Applied Phlebotinum to escape from its accretion disk (at least it was made clear they weren't trapped in the black hole itself!) As with everything in Stargate, moderately plausible science is liberally mixed with Rule of Cool, and black holes get to interact with Stargates (and nuclear weapons) in lots of interesting ways.

In "The Pegasus Project," the team combines a Stargate, Explodium, Technobabble, and a black hole to dial the Supergate and keep the Ori out of the Milky Way. Points for McKay telling Mitchell that it's not the black hole he's looking at, it's the accretion disk. Not that Mitchell cares.

Sam: "The singularity is about to explode"? Martin Lloyd: Yes? Sam: Everything about that statement is wrong.

In Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, a 2 part episode "Flight of the War Witch" has Buck and friends navigating a path through a "collapsar" to help people in another universe.

Red Dwarf once featured a "White Hole," which supposedly spewed out all the matter black holes sucked up…and the time too, which doesn't make a lick of sense. At the very least, you'd think it'd be physically impossible to drift into one.

The pilot episode of Andromeda did quite well in averting this trope until the very end, when they escaped using "Nova Bombs" to turn the black hole into a white hole. Then again, the Nova Bombs are never actually explained fully, only that they do some sort of magically scientific stuff to planets and/or stars, and their use on the black hole was a case of "What do we have to lose?" This is, after all, the same universe that has singularity cannons as semi-rare but completely viable technology, so super-future humans don't so much understand the laws of physics as have them written in pencil for whenever they feel like changing the rules. Then again, it's eventually revealed that the stars (and black holes) are alive. In fact, they're pissed at Hunt for blowing up one of their sisters. At this point, all the laws of physics can do is shrug and take a smoke breka.

On Heroes, a minor character named Stephen Canfield has the power to make Unrealistic Black Holes with his mind. He eventually kills himself by creating one and being sucked inside it.

The Doctor Who episode "The Impossible Planet" features a planet in a stable orbit around a black hole; in the show the orbit is only maintained due to the expenditure of great amounts of energy to cancel out the gravity of the black hole. In reality, objects can orbit black holes just as easily as they can orbit any other massive object (our entire galaxy orbits one). That said, the episode actually seems to depict a planet that's maintaining a stable orbit within a black hole's event horizon without actually describing it as such. This should indeed be impossible without some fairly fancy tricks that are beyond physics as we understand it. That said, if that were true, it's hard to see how anyone could have found out about it in the first place, as anything within a black hole's event horizon should be completely invisible. Although the planet is generating a "gravity corridor" which allows for safe ship landing, so it's quite possible that someone discovered that and followed it through.

In The Big Bang Theory, Stephen Hawking makes a joke to humiliate Sheldon, asking what he and black holes have in common. The punchline is "They both suck". Of course, this IS Stephen Hawking talking, so it's obvious he's just making a joke at the expense of one of his biggest (and definitely his most obnoxious) fans.

Space: 1999. Moonbase Alpha discovers a "black sun" in its path, but ends up passing safely through it and out the white hole on the other side, thanks to the intervention of a Sufficiently Advanced Alien. Some experimental shielding technology was involved, too.

An episode of Eureka has miniature black holes popping up around town, then combining to form a large continually growing one for the climax. They somehow manage to be able to swallow whole buildings and pull cars through the air (implying they have more gravity and therefore more mass than the Earth) so where all that mass spontaneously appears from and why they don't yank the Earth out of its orbit is anyones guess.

In the 2014 live-action adaptation of the Flash, the Season 1 finale ends with Barry destroying a tiny black hole that threatened to consume the city by running around the accretion disk. Needless to say, this is not a strategy one should attempt or expect to work on actual black holes. Season 2 reveals that Barry's running around was merely slowing down the black hole's expansion. It took a Heroic Sacrifice from Ronnie, using Firestorm's energy, to collapse the black hole.

Rush sends the Rocinante on a trip through one of these in the songs that make up "Cygnus X-1". "Book 1" from A Farewell to Kings has the ship flying in; it comes out halfway through "Book 2" from Hemispheres.

In the song Into the Black Hole of Ayreon, the Migrator enters into the black hole located in the center of the quasar 3C 273. The next song has it travelling through a wormhole. located within the hole.

The video of Black Hole Sun has no actual Black Hole, albeit some simulated gravity effects.

The Blue Öyster Cult song Heavy Metal (Black and Silver) was inspired by a popular science work about the idea that black holes could be used as a means of faster-than-light travel. Inevitably it simplifies the science and takes liberties.

Newspaper Comics

The Far Side: Suddenly, through forces not yet clearly understood, Darren Belsky's apartment became the center of a new black hole.

Pinball

Unsurprisingly, Black Hole has one of these. You enter it for multiball.

Exalted has one in the form of the Yozi Isidoros, the Black Boar that Twists the Skies, who is a sapient, boar shaped black hole who serves as the cosmic embodiment of unstoppable force and Heroic willpower.

The Dungeons & Dragons has the "Sphere of Annihilation" which is claimed to be a literal hole in the multiverse.

The Spelljammer setting implies they are corpses of stellar dragons. The giant living spaceship, the Spelljammer, generates larger versions of the sphere as a weapon against other ships.

Video Games

According to the plans shown in the Long-Fall Boot video, the dual portal device from Portal contains a miniature black hole. As well as two miniature German potato-masher grenades intended to restart the black hole if it should evaporate, and a circular slide rule to determine how far away you should run if the black hole starts expanding. You have to take the portal gun apart to get to it. We should note here that the person who explains this is Aperture CEO Cave Johnson, and as he is known to be a blithering idiot this may not actually be the case.

In Go Beryllium, you have to dodge Hawking radiation until the thing evaporates. It's the size of an atom, but then again, so are you...

Mega Man gets the Black Hole Bomb in 9. If those were real black holes, then Earth would get destroyed.

Saturn in the Game BoyMega Man V provides the Black Hole weapon. It forms above Mega Man's head, sucks in weak enemies, and then spits out debris.

Mega Man X8 has the Squeeze Bomb weapon, obtainable from Gravity Antonion, who has gravity itself at his command. It creates a slowly-moving black hole that pulls in smaller enemies and can break through crystals, especially those created by Earthrock Trilobite.

The Gravity Well weapon is obtained in X3 from Gravity Beetle. The normal shot makes a localized high-gravity area to crush enemies, while the charged version launches a more powerful version off the top of the screen and is strong enough to drag enemies away.

Mega Man Star Force 3: Black Ace has an exclusive card called Black End Galaxy, only usable as Black Ace. It involves creating a black hole where the enemy is, then quickly slicing through it, causing the black hole and enemy inside to blow up.

Clank: Oh dear. Why must we always choose between certain death and probable death?

In Unreal Tournament 2004, one of the more interesting weapons of the Chaos UT mod is a "Gravity Vortex". Any players nearby are sucked into it and will die, regardless of health, and armor. The unrealistic part is it does not affect any ammunition shot near the vortex.

Super Mario Galaxy. Bowser's plans go bust, one of his stars collapses and turns into a black hole, universe gets sucked in? Disregarding the fact that it's actually possible to fight inside said star without dying painfully, black holes... just don't work that way. The reason no one thought of this while playing the game was the fact that it's completely freaking awesome.

The black holes that function as bottomless pits for each level. There are only two realistic things to them: they suck and they red-shift.

In the sequel, Bowser somehow manages to top himself by roaring a black hole to existence for the final battle. After taking enough punishment, he admits defeat and is swallowed by the black hole, closing it. Not to worry, though, Bowser shows up again in the credits, and he's tiny! (and mad!)

While we're on the subject, The Void is somewhat of a subversion: It eventually sucks up everything in the multiverse. Black holes aren't interdimensional, and they aren't cosmic vacuums; they just suck up anything that's too close. Also, there's a castle in it.

The black holes in Spore. They're covered in lightning, you can fly right up to them and, with the right upgrade, through them and out another black hole. Another wormhole confusion example.

Bacchus' Black Hole Sphere in Star Ocean: The Last Hope. A black hole that inexplicably appears directly in the path of the ship mid-warp, sucks it in and spits it out in an alternate universe, completely intact.

You can create a black hole in Scribblenauts. It sucks in everything within a certain radius and destroys anything that touches it. And it evaporates after a few seconds. That's actually fairly realistic, if you're willing to fudge the masses and timescales by several orders of magnitude. Although it really should evaporate in a very loud BANG, to be strictly accurate. And in the sequel, spawning a black hole causes it to suck up any nearby objects for a few seconds. When the few seconds are up, it expands and consumes the entire stage, protagonist included. And it cannot be removed once spawned.

Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has them in a few boss battles. In one, it's the result of the Dark Star's defeat and does huge damage if you don't mash A and B to make Mario and Luigi run away, while in the final Giant Bowser battle, the mech form of Princess Peach's Castle has a cannon that fires them, with you having to keep sliding the stylus across the touch screen to make Bowser launch himself back out of them when caught (and the final part of the battle has both sides stuck in black holes on different sides of the arena).

Bomberman 64: The Second Attack!. Where to begin. The big bad uses one to suck in planets and store his army and sustains it with gravity generators located on captured planets INSIDE the black hole and his interstellar warship (also inside the black hole). Then there's Bulzeeb. He attacks with black hole bombs which are, as you may have guessed, bombs that create a large (compared to most explosions in the game) black hole upon detonation. The black hole only compresses anything in its blast radius that's not the ground. And apparently Bulzeeb's armor is black hole proof since he can enter the black hole without being compressed or harmed. To give the game credit, at least they show death by compression into a singularity when it does hit you.

The Geometry Wars games feature Gravity Wells, a semi-sentient enemy that drifts benignly towards you, doing absolutely nothing. If attacked, it burns brightly, and starts drawing in everything nearby (to add to their mass), sometimes allowing them to orbit it. The gravity increases with the size of the Well. The only way to end the Wells is to shoot them to chip their mass away. And the gravity multiplies if multiple Gravity Wells are allowed to try to engulf each other (they just dance around each other), to the point your craft cannot escape the pull. Oddly, Gravity Wells will split and repel your firepower, meaning you have to draw close, shoot, and use the gravity to slingshot yourself to safety.

In the Interactive Fiction game Gateway II: Homeworld (loosely based on Frederik Pohl's Heechee Saga), the Heechee have hidden away from the Assassinsinside a black hole. The only way to get through it is with a specially-modified Heechee ship that can survive entering a singularity. The game even goes so far as to describe the devices that allow that to happen.

In Star Trek: Armada, black holes are just background objects, unless a ship's engines are disabled. Then they start to fall in and can be destroyed. No time dilation though.

In Conquest: Frontier Wars, black holes suck in ships that get too close and may either destroy them or throw them to the other edge of the map. Must be one big slingshot. Used as a plot point in the campaign.

In Haegemonia: Legions of Iron, black holes are giant shiny funnels in space that sound like a twister. Getting close to them is not recommended. They show up rarely though.

And when they do, they continuously damage every ship in a large radius (probably because real-life black holes are major radiation hazards). In the only campaign mission where one shows up, the player's second in command warns that "our larger ships are already having trouble keeping themselves away from it". What is unrealistic is that there is a pair of nebulae barely a single AU away from the black hole; how they managed to avoid being sucked in is a mystery. Another unrealism is the fact that the accretion disc is VERY fast when it should be very slow due to relativistic time dilation.

The End of the World level of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) features black and purple spheres that suck everything towards them and kill you if you touch them. They also resemble the Eye of Sauron!

In Sonic Colors, Sonic can become one by harnessing the power of the violet wisps. And one is created after the defeat of the final boss. The final level is Sonic trying to escape it. He fails around the 31 second mark.

Sonic Forces has the Violet Wispon, a weapon that can shoot mini-black holes to suck in enemies and rings.

Star Fox has the black hole level which is the loop of wandering in a space junkyard filled with boxes and broken Arwings floating around until you find one of the three warp spots which sends you somewhere else.

StarCraft II has this as a protoss ability. It hovers above the ground, sucking in grid lines and mathematical formulae, and everything within range is stretched out and pulled in... until the black hole finally explodes and the units emerge unharmed. In fact, when one is used on your army, the correct strategy is to order all your other units into the black hole as well so the enemy cannot easily destroy them while your main force is gone. As a bit of further explanation how this odd effect came about, the original revealed Black Hole ability did in fact destroy the units. However, it was probably changed for balance reasons (and renamed to Vortex), but the graphics were not changed.

In the Touhou fighting game Immaterial and Missing Power, boss Suika Ibuki creates black holes using her ability to manipulate density. They can draw in the player character but do not damage the terrain and are not instantly lethal.

In the Mass Effect series, the Blackstorm Projector is colloquially called the "black-hole gun" (and the nickname was Played for Laughs in the Gamestop advert for it), but it in fact fires a particle encased in a high-powered mass effect field, which elevates it to colossal mass, thus creating a gravitational singularity. Also, the Singularity biotic power does not actually suck in enemies, but causes them to levitate and slowly orbit the object. It has no effect on anything else and can safely be thrown at one's own feet.

The Nazi Zombies mini-game of Black Ops has a small hand-held device* Named the Gersch Device that when you press a few buttons and throw it the device generates a small black hole which sucks in all nearby zombies and which closes within a short period of time. Realistically the entire facility the character was on would have been sucked into the black hole if it were anything like a real one. What makes it even stranger is that the creator of the device notes that it was meant to be a portable teleporter which is proven if the player decides to jump into the black hole as it will teleport them to a random part of the map, so this makes you wonder why it acts as a destructive black hole on the zombies but only functions as if it were a worm hole if you touched it.

X-COM Interceptor has semi-realistic black holes that can adversely affect travel on the interstellar map. They can suck in probes (and do so from a surprising distance away) and ships traveling near them are slowed by a significant amount as they try to escape the event horizon. The plot itself is set off by the discovery of an intercepted alien message that shows massive fleets flying into a black hole. It's initially suspected this is some kind of bizarre disposal method, but eventually it's discovered that the aliens have figured out a way to turn black holes into wormholes to a Pocket Dimension where they are building an indestructible superweapon. The rest of the game turns into a race against time to find a way to counter the superweapon.

In Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf, you encounter these during the last level. They start sucking you in as soon as you get close, and you can die if you let them actually suck you in. However, you can easily get away from them by just air-swimming in an opposite direction. They are actually necessary to get back to the ground in the Gravity Screw section.

At the end of Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon, Roger Wilco's ship is sucked into "Black Hole Bertha" and sent into a parallel universe (or perhaps the same universe, but farther back in time) to wind up on Earth in 1989 at the Sierra offices. No physical harm is done to Roger or the Two Guys from Andromeda.

And when the 4th game begins, he seems to have gone back through the black hole to the planet Magmetheus.

Putty has a black hole that tries to suck up Bots. The player character can mold itself into it, and use it to get rid of a pesky Flying Saucer.

No Man's Sky features one at the center of the game's universe, which is fine and dandy... except that it serves as game's final destination, and as such means that players are expected to eventually get to it.

Darius Gaiden has the "Black Hole Bomber" Smart Bomb, which sucks enemies into its circle before emitting a shockwave damaging all enemies on screen.

The "Space Cadet" table of Full Tilt! Pinball has a kickout called "Black Hole" (oddly enough it's white). There's also a mission ("Black Hole Mission") where you've to lit all the engine lights and send the ball to the "black hole". When you accomplish it, you get the message "Black Hole eliminated".

Both invoked and partially subverted in one old text-based game, that appeared in a book of computer games in BASIC language, named Starbase 2000note A game similar to Star Trek Text Game, as two of the events you could experiment on it. In the first case your ship was hit by X-Rays emitted by a black hole, sending you at random to a close point of the map. In the second one the hole appeared complete with gravitational lensing, and sent your ship to the opposite part of the map. Played straight in another game that appeared in the same book, Quest for Riemannian, with a black hole sucking your ship and giving a Game Over complete with a Lost in Transmission.

In a recent patch they tried to make it slightly more realistic by having enemies rotate around the center.

Saints Row IV has the Black Hole Launcher (aka the "Singularity Gun") with significantly reduced effectiveness than what a real black hole launcher would have, for gameplay purposes of course.

Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon: Black Holes appear on several maps as hazards, usually in the centre of the map. Black Holes will pull any nearby object into its event horizon, destroying anything that reaches the event horizon.

In Stick Fight, one gun's projectile creates an ever-expanding black hole once it touches something or goes off the screen, sucking everything nearby into it as it grows.

In Katamari, this is Discussed when Odeko calls a rip in space a 'black hole'. Ichigo protests, saying their brainiac should know better; he clarifies that this isn't a 'black hole', but a 'hole that is black':

Odeko: An opening to a completely dark space where the absence of hue would draw in any nearby color. You know. Science.

SF Debris lambastes Star Trek: Voyager's version of this from "Parallax" in his review, noting that saying you can escape a black hole's event horizon by punching a hole in it is like saying you can punch a hole in the range you can travel on a tank of gas and therefore go further.

Western Animation

In Transformers, there have been two major black hole occurrences, both falling squarely in this territory:

In Transformers: Generation 1, a black hole sucks in two ships: one that the good guys and bad guys are on, and one to get sucked in before it just to show us the threat is real. That other ship went 'kaboom' before entering. There's plenty of "Oh, noes, we're gonna get squishificated!" talk. And then they go in and... wind up in a color-inverted universe. And rather easily escape.

In Transformers Cybertron, the entire plot revolves around the black hole created by the destruction of Unicron. It had many space and time-bending effects throughout the universe (and the multiverse, if we take All There in the Manual into account.) When you throw dark gods into the mix, you expect it to be a bit different from the mundane version...

Averted in the Futurama episode "A Flight to Remember". Bender still has some hope that his love interest, after falling through a black hole, may happen to just reappear safe somewhere else. Prof. Farnsworth, however, being both Genre Savvy and a brilliant scientist, after reassuring him by confirming his hypothesis, brutally explains to the others (with an eloquent gesture) that she's dead and gone. And played straight with the black hole itself being depicted as a highly-visible, blue-ish vortex.

One episode of Justice League Unlimited had a scientist who grew a black hole in his stomach. By the end of the episode, Booster Gold is able to release everything that had been sucked in, completely unharmed.

One episode of the Super Friends had Wonder Woman, Hawkman and Black Vulcan trapped on an artificial play world built by The Toyman in the center of a black hole (no, they don't explain how he was able to do this). Aside from not being able to escape the black hole the heroes walk, run, jump and otherwise move perfectly fine. At the end Superman and Green Lantern fuse into one being to tear a hole in the black hole and allow the others to escape.

The power of the main villain in LEGO's Hero Factory is creating black holes, using a staff. As if the writer was aiming to play this trope straight as best as she could, they are actual holes you can jump into, and... cling onto their inner "walls". Even though the wall was intangible and characters simply floated through them in the previous scene. Their sucking power is so immense, they pull the weapons out of the Heroes' hands, but inside, you can freely jump around from wall to wall without falling deeper into it. Another interesting thing is that if you jump upwards into it, you end up on its wall, but if you climb out of it upwards, you will fall out downwards through its "bottom". How can these black holes be neutralized? By throwing anti-gravity flying devices into them.

Hero Factory's predecessor BIONICLE also played with this. When Nuhvok-Kal, the Bohrok-Kal of Gravity got too powerful for its own good, it turned into a miniature black hole. It didn't suck in anything else, in fact it was never described further. We have to assume the black hole simply evaporated.

Megas XLR had Coop create a black hole once to defeat a villain, while still in New Jersey. How does Coop get rid of it? By creating another black hole and the two somehow cancel each other out.

The Tick once battled a race of aliens who planned on destroying the universe by throwing a black hole into ANOTHER black hole. The Tick, being the Tick, ended up having to catch one and throw it away from the other.

"John Blackstar, astronaut, is swept through a black hole, into an ancient, alien universe!"

Johnny Sunspot from Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!, and one of many black holes he creates using only his Tricked-Out Gloves (which don't really look tricked out). They only pull in who or what he wants them to pull in, and he can decide whether the person or object will be released... or sent into oblivion.

Dogstar: In "Rockin' in the Flea World", the Dogstar is nearly sucked into a black hole. It is depicted as a giant black sphere hanging in space.

Spider-Man: The Animated Series: Averted in the case of the portals created by The Spot. Even though they are described in numerous instances to look like black holes, Dr. Connors explains that they lack the supergravity of their "big brothers", making them different.

During Albert Einstein's fight with Chyna on Celebrity Deathmatch, Einstein fills a normal blender with negative hydrogen ions to create a black hole. Chyna holds onto the ropes as the hole sucks in one of her arms. Einstein then turns off the blender and the black hole disappears.

An episode of The SimpsonsTreehouse Of Horror had Professor Frink accidentally create a miniature black hole with a particle collider. At first its harmless, but Homer begins disposing of garbage into it, causing it to slowly expand, and letting others do the same for money. Eventually, the hole sucks in the whole town, except for Maggie, who throws her pacifier at it. The black hole pauses, begins sucking on the pacifier, and flies off into space, leaving the rest of Earth alone. Meanwhile, on the other side of the hole, the rest of Springfield finds themselves on an alien world that has become enamored with the culture they've gleaned from their garbage.

Played for laughs in Rex The Runt. The gang manage to pilot the entire Earth (which they punctured) into a black hole (which makes bathroom plughole gurgling noises), and find only a rather drab cafeteria at the centre. They call a cab to get them back home again.

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